Character Clues

Character Analysis

Family Life

You can tell a lot about Yuri Zhivago from his family life... since he never seems to be much of a part of his family's life. Sure, he never chose to get called away to work for the army in World War I, and he never chose to get captured by the Forest Brotherhood. But following these events, he never makes much of an effort to be with his family. As soon as he gets to Yuriatin, he starts spending his nights at Lara Antipova's place.

When he finds out his family has been deported from the country, he also doesn't make any effort to track them down. He just sort of uses this as an excuse to start over fresh with Lara. The dude totally does the same thing with his third "wife," Marina, whom he totally ditches one day (along with their two kids) so he can work on his writing. (Do we even know these kids' names?)

The ironic and terrible thing about all of this is that Zhivago was himself abandoned by his father when he was young, and it looks like he's just going to continue the cycle.

But why do you think this is? Zhivago is a pretty sympathetic character, overall, so why does Pasternak give him such a complicated family life? (We could say the same about Lara.) If Zhivago and Lara are supposed to be together, then why didn't it just happen? Maybe Pasternak's point is that the conditions in Russia—both before and after the Revolution—somehow made it impossible for true love (and true art, like Zhivago's poetry) to exist.

Occupation

In the world of Soviet Russia, your occupation is everything—after all, you'll be arrested if you don't have one. Zhivago, though, can't seem to stop quitting his jobs as a doctor, because all he really wants to do is barricade himself in a room and write poetry.

The Soviets aren't big on poetry, though. They want Zhivago to do something more useful, and Zhivago's desire to write instead of working as a doctor eventually gets him into really hot water with the Soviet police. It's this conflict that eventually leads him to give up his relationship with Lara and spend his remaining days growing old in Moscow.

But hey, why don't the Soviets consider poetry an occupation? Is it because poems don't bring in a lot of money? Because they don't feed or cure people? Because they're not "useful" in any concrete way? Are those the right criteria for judging art? Do we think about poems (and other art forms) differently? Do you think "artist" can be a legit occupation?

Physical Appearances

At several points in this novel, Zhivago becomes downright grade-A nasty in his appearance.

Okay, to be fair, the guy has to hike halfway across Russia—Russia, folks—and trade his clothes for food. But later in the book, his appearance gets this way simply because he stops caring altogether. In the first case, his funky appearance is the product of oppression; in the second, it's the product of depression.

See what we did there? In any case, when Zhivago lets himself go for the second time, we're pretty sure we understand what that means: he's been beaten down by the Soviet government, and he's pretty much given up on any kind of public life.

Sex and Love

Zhivago is a passionate man, and Lara is a passionate woman. The two of them like each other, so they decide to have an affair.

Now, the narrator doesn't come out and say that this is a good thing, since both of them do love their spouses, and both of them feel bad about cheating. But at the same time, the two of them seem to connect on a level that can only be expressed through sex, no matter whom it hurts.

That's not to say that acting on sexual urges is always good, though. The lawyer Komarovsky does the same thing when Lara is only sixteen, and even though the relationship is consensual, the book makes it pretty clear that Komarovsky is a bad dude for taking advantage of a young girl the way he does.

Whether sex is good or bad in this book seems to depend on the reasons people have for doing it. It's always a little bit dangerous, though: when sex is involved, people can get really hurt.

Social Status

Yuri Zhivago comes from a wealthy family, even though his deadbeat dad squandered all of his inheritance and threw himself off a train. But that doesn't stop the Soviet government from holding Zhivago's status against him. The Soviets, you see, weren't big fans of people who came from rich families; they thought rich people (or people who came from rich families) would never be loyal to the working class.

It doesn't help Zhivago's case one bit, either, that he's married to Tonya Gromeko, who also comes from a rich family. Put the two together, and you've got as unpopular a couple as you're going to get in Soviet Russia. (Did we mention that Zhivago would rather be a poet than a doctor?) For the most part, Zhivago's problems for the rest of this novel stem either from his social class or from his stubborn refusal to buy into Soviet ideas.